Enraged at the paranoia, the dictatorial atmosphere, mutual distrust and outright opposition on board, all Dutch journalists to leave the ship which the Dutch activists seek confrontation with Israeli marines in the Gaza Strip.

According to the four reporters who left, they were censored by the activists, who did not respond to any critical questions, such as the financing of the ship. The money was scraped together by collections in Dutch mosques, as this newspaper revealed earlier.

The Greek Ministry of Citizen Protection on Friday issued a statement saying that the Minister, C. Papoutsis, decided to prohibit the departure of ships flying either Greek or foreign flags “to the maritime area” of Gaza.

The sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is on the verge of collapse as investigators have uncovered major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her in his Manhattan hotel suite in May, according to two well-placed law enforcement officials.

Although forensic tests found unambiguous evidence of a sexual encounter between Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a French politician, and the woman, prosecutors do not believe much of what the accuser has told them about the circumstances or about herself.

The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters not yet made public in court, told The Associated Press that prosecutors have raised issues about the accuser’s credibility in the case against Strauss-Kahn, but would not elaborate on what those issues were.

A separate law enforcement official who is familiar with the case, but not authorized to speak about it publicly, told the AP that the issue was not necessarily about the rape accusation itself, but about troubling questions surrounding the alleged victim’s background that could damage her credibility on the witness stand. The official refused to elaborate. AP sources: Accuser issues shake Strauss-Kahn case

[…] [The maid’s lawyer] says someone leaked the details to the New York Times, some of them false, to discredit her.

Bottom line: DSK’s defense team seriously undermined the maid’s credibility by saying that she consorted with a drug dealer, owns 5 cell phones (she denies this), has had hundreds of thousands of dollars into her bank account, and lied to get asylum. But the maid is sticking to her side of the story, which her lawyer described in graphic detail for the first time.

He repeated the worst evidence against DSK at least 4 times each:

he bruised her vagina

he ripped her stockings

she spit out his semen on the carpet and on the wall, and her supervisor saw it

Two peasant brothers were brutally crucified on “the example of Christ” as forces loyal to Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara continue to target perceived supporters of his ousted Christian predecessor, Laurent Gbagbo.

Raphael Aka Kouame died of his injuries; incredibly his younger brother, Kouassi Privat Kacou, survived the ordeal. The pair were badly beaten and tortured before being crudely nailed to cross-shaped planks by their hands and feet with steel spikes on 29 May.

The brothers were falsely accused of hiding weapons in their home village of Binkro, which has been targeted by Ouattara supporters as the birthplace of a key enemy. They are looking for Prefect Koko Djei, President of the General Council of Oumé and an official in Gbagbo’s Ivorian Popular Front party, who is accused of distributing weapons to young Oumé men. The brothers repeatedly denied any involvement in a weapons cache, but their pleas were ignored.

After crucifying the brothers, Ouattara’s men took them on an extensive search of Binkro, but they found only a store of medical equipment and supplies, which they looted. The seriously wounded pair were then taken to prison in Oumé, where Raphael died in the night. […] Brothers crucified by Ouattara forces in Ivory Coast

We the undersigned are writing to register our astonishment and dismay at your public denunciation of the English Defence League, and in particular your reference to the “neo-fascists that had infiltrated the administration of the group”.

This is a grossly inaccurate and unfair slander against the leaders and membership of the EDL, who have never wavered in their refusal to include neo-Nazis, fascists, or adherents of any other ideology that seeks to divide people based on their ethnicity. […]

[…] No less important, however, than this deep symbiosis between superficially implausible collaborators is the potent tutorial relationship that has been established between the patricians of the left and the emancipated youth of the contemporary West. Such an alliance, conducted under the aegis of the so-called “liberal” academy, is equally unholy. As with the German universities of the 1930s, modern universities throughout the “free world” have become factories of political indoctrination in which history is reinterpreted as a chronicle of infamy and the young are conscripted into the army of those who promise the advent of a golden millennium. […]

The cultural stereotype of youth rebelling against the progenitor generation no longer holds, at least not in the West. Instead, what we are observing is the tightening bond between the clichéd antagonists of old. The generation of the Sixties, controlling the levers of power, has embarked on an intensive recruiting campaign among its epigones to ensure the eventual victory of what we might call the Fourth Reich, a grim collectivist world governed by the presumably enlightened benefactors of all mankind. […]

This latter development, the melding of the generations into a bichronic demographic, is the key to the program adopted by the utopian left in taking command of the institutions of learning. Ideas concocted in the insulated laboratories of the ivory tower and powered by an amorphous longing for a “we are the world” paradise predicated on the dissolution of the rigors of educated thought have become the reigning ideology of the era. […] David Solway: The Coming of the Fourth Reich?

[…] However, it has become increasingly clear that the EDL has morphed and diverged from its original course. They now have clearly been infiltrated by the worst kind of influences, something that had successfully staved off for years, and they’re no longer staving it off. Roberta Moore, the leader of the Jewish Division, has broken with the EDL. Perhaps the decentralization of the group or the loose grip Tommy Robinson held on its tether is responsible for this terrible shift in the EDL’s direction — I don’t know. But whatever the case may be, the EDL has done a Charles Johnson. And they are now unrecognizable to me. I am sure regular Atlas readers have noticed that some time ago I stopped covering their events — I was waiting to see how things would shake out. I was waiting to see if the forces of good would recapture the heart and soul of the group. Alas, it was not to be.

Now that the person whom I most trusted in the EDL, Roberta Moore, has resigned, as she was increasingly uncomfortable with the neo-fascists that had infiltrated the administration of the group, I too am withdrawing my support from the EDL. I hope that genuine anti-jihadists in Britain will also leave the EDL and work with Roberta on starting a new group that will resist definitively and firmly all attempts to divert it from its mission of fighting against jihad and for human rights. EDL Shake-up ; Change for the worse at the EDL